If pure hydrogen and pure oxygen are both very flammable, why is water not?
In: 1
Burning means reacting with oxygen and making heat. The reaction for hydrogen burning is
2 H2 + O2 –> 2 H2O
**Water is hydrogen that has already burnt.** Water is like the “ash” of hydrogen. It’s the product formed by hydrogen and oxygen burning, which is why it itself doesn’t want to burn.
And in a more general sense, what other people are saying is true and really important: the properties of a material come from the arrangement of atoms, not just the atoms. Water doesn’t act like hydrogen or oxygen because it *isn’t* hydrogen or oxygen, it’s water!
Eg sodium is a silvery metal that explodes on contact with water. Chlorine is a toxic yellow green gas. Combine one atom of sodium and one of chlorine and you have sodium chloride – *table salt* which you eat every day. Just because it contains sodium and chlorine atoms, you can’t expect compounds to act like the atoms would by themselves. Forming the compound changes the properties.
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